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Friday, September 7, 2012

Your Vagina Is Gonna Get You Killed (Pitch Black)

Pitch Black was an
independent science fiction movie that came out about fifteen years ago. It
starred Vin Diesel, featured Claudia Black, and didn’t really have anyone else
in it that I’ve ever heard of.

It is great.

Seriously. It’s psychological horror to the max, one of Vin
Diesel’s best performances (and I do not mean that sarcastically, he’s a lovely
man), and a fantastically imaginative story. But. It kind of makes having a
vagina a really bad thing.

Let me back up. Pitch
Black is a horror movie, like I said. The basic plot isn’t very
imaginative, it’s all in the execution. You see, while on autopilot, a cargo
and passenger spaceship collides with an asteroid and has to crash land on the
nearest planet. Most of the crew and passengers die in the crash, and all we’re
left with is a straggler crew of colonists and random travelers.

Oh, and a serial killer. This is Riddick (of the absolutely
horrible Chronicles of Riddick and
the surprisingly good Butcher Bay
videogame). Riddick is a sociopath (as in, antisocial personality disorder),
very strong, and very disinterested in the lives of the other survivors.

So all these people are stuck on a desert planet with a
killer. Great. At this point in the movie, it’s not unreasonable to assume that
Riddick is going to slowly pick everyone off. That looks pretty likely.

The survivors, which include the co-pilot who wanted to
jettison the passengers when the ship was crashing, the bounty hunter in charge
of bringing Riddick in, some random colonists, a smuggler, an Imam and the
children he’s escorting to New Mecca, and a young boy with no discernable
parents, set about searching the planet for a way off.

Like I said, it’s a desert planet, so they’re dying in the
heat and trying to deal with conserving their water. There’s creepy stuff
everywhere, like giant skeletons and massive caves. Oh, and two suns. That’s
fun.

Eventually they find a human settlement. It’s deserted, but
there’s a transport there. It just needs fuel cells, which they have back at
their ship. Yay! Oh wait—there’s also a model of this planet’s solar system. It
shows that the two suns keep the planet in the light for twenty-two days (or
years—not important). And then, the entire planet is pitched into darkness.

Darkness, for the record, is very, very bad.

You see, they’re not actually alone on the planet. They have
company in the form of cave-dwelling pterodactyl things. But as long as you
don’t go in the caves, where it’s dark, you’ll be fine. Oh shit.

And so the real ticking clock begins. The suns are setting
and the evil monsters are coming out to devour everything on the planet’s
surface. You’ll only survive if you stay in the light. Eeep.

But what the hell does this incredibly primal, terrifying
story have to do with vaginas?

Warning: This is about to get a little icky.

It turns out that the monsters can smell blood. As stated
before, they are blind and live in darkness, but they can hear very well, and
they can smell blood. This means that if you’re standing quite still and don’t
have any open wounds, you should be fine. And that works for most of the movie.
The heroes cautiously sneak past the monsters and try to get back to the
transport. Riddick has a leg up on everyone because he can see in the dark, and
becomes the reluctant hero.

Somehow, though, the monsters keep finding them. The
monsters just will not leave them alone. And finally Riddick figures it out.

Jack, the suspiciously alone boy, is actually a girl. A girl
who is on her period.

That’s how the monsters can constantly find them. They’re
smelling the blood that Jack is constantly producing. I actually do have to
give props on this one. It’s a really clever way to up the tension, and it’s a
twist that you really don’t see coming. But all that aside, it’s also
incredibly horrifying.

Look, women’s bodies are subject to a kind of horror that I
think most people don’t really think about most of the time. There are monsters
pregnancies on Torchwood, X-Files, Fringe, Angel, and Doctor Who. There are women who discover
that their bodies have been turned against them and made into killing machines
in Firefly, The Avengers comics, Torchwood
again, Doctor Who again, and Farscape. There is rape. There is the
entire Alien franchise.

Body. Horror.

But I’ll be honest, this one squicked me out the most. Look,
getting your period is never a fun thing, and it’s definitely something that
freaks you out at the very beginning. I don’t know many girls who can’t
remember looking down, seeing blood, and freaking out. Even when they
rationally knew what was happening to them. It’s still scary as hell. You’re
bleeding you out into your underwear, and everyone just expects you to be okay
with it. Ick.

There’s a special kind of horror, though, that comes from
the idea that this event, which is ultimately perfectly normal, is going to get
you killed. That your status as a woman has doomed you, just because of what
you have between your legs. That your vagina, in a frightfully literal sense, is
going to get you killed.

The only other movie that immediately comes to mind as
having this level of horror associated with the onset of menstruation is Carrie. In that, Carrie doesn’t know
what’s happening to her and the other students mock her and throw tampons. It’s
awful. But at least it’s not that actual catalyst for her death. Carrie might
have gone nuts because her mother was a controlling psycho and everyone at
school was heartless, but it wasn’t directly her vagina’s fault.

Here, it is. And I don’t love that.

I get that the impulse is there to write a good story no
matter the costs. And I agree that Pitch
Black is a good story. Hell, it’s a great story. But we need to remember
the messages that we send with stories like this. Messages that say that
because you’re a woman, you’re dooming the rest of us. Your vagina is your
weakness. Better to have been born a man.

They’re messages that I don’t want any young girl to hear.
And I hope you don’t either.

I wanna hold you and apologize for the awful things they did to you in Chronicles of Riddick.

1 comment:

"There are women who discover that their bodies have been turned against them and made into killing machines..." - this is a de-facto description of cultural-marxist-leninist feminism. Don't complain about how you've been turned into a weapon if you spent any amount of time as a woman allowing others to do your thinking for you. Not all men are monsters, But all women are the chosen weapon of civilization destroyers. Stop writing a blog trying to get others to see/agree with you about how clever you think you are and instead, do some real research, without the menses-coloured glasses of feminism and maybe you will start to be part of the solution, instead of the primary problem. By this I mean all women, not just you(author)